BY ALAN BRUNACINI
In the last series, I presented a simple five-part basic performance management system that connects and integrates standard operating procedures (SOPs), training, application, critique, and revision into a program package. Using the system parts over and over gives bosses on every level a fighting chance (i.e., “beachhead”) to effectively organize, take control of, and manage the organizational resources required to deliver better and better service.
Going through a set of predictable ups and downs is a natural part of trying to improve (read “change”) how we command and control fast moving hazard zone operations while we are actually delivering that same service—the change challenge is a lot like trying to fly the plane and fix the plane at the same time. We must continually try to improve the system because the most important fire we will ever fight is the next one.
My experience in originally developing and using the model involves a piece of ancient history. I got the job in the early 1970s as a young assistant chief to somehow modernize how a very traditional urban fire department conducted firefighting command and control operations. The way we operated basically had not been changed, improved, or modified for the 50 years before I became its boss. Most of the firefighters understood, were comfortable with, and loved the system just the way it was.
FIREGROUND COMMAND
We named what we were trying to create “Fireground Command” (FGC). The project occurred before the term “Incident Command” was widely used. Once I got started with FGC, I never stopped. Fifty-plus years later, I am still actively involved with teaching, developing, and trying to understand local hazard zone management, which only means I pretty much have a one-track mind and a major screw loose.
Assembling the five-part model was the result of 20 years of active teaching, responding to local incidents, participating in critiques, and attending endless meetings with company and command officers who were going through every painful personal stage of profound occupational change. I was their boss. I wanted them to change. They did not want to change.
I very quickly discovered that anyone who believes that we can create operational excellence if we can only discover and apply some magical management miracle is just plain nuts. Change agents are effective when they have and persistently follow a simple boss behavior routine (like the five-step model) that can lead the entire team through the full range of unavoidable positive-negative/happy-sad supervisory, management, leadership stages and phases that go with trying to improve service while you are delivering that same service.
Trying to improve how we command firefighting operations must somehow deal with the huge amount of operational and tactical variations that naturally occur from incident to incident. Trying to develop a management system that will mold itself to fit and effectively respond to those variations becomes a major management challenge. This is particularly difficult in the beginning of the change process, when the officers must keep doing the traditional stuff that gets the work done (enter, search, apply water, ventilate, etc.) while they are (simultaneously) trying to do the new command routine. Sometimes it’s difficult to do new stuff and old stuff at the same time until you can make the new stuff old stuff.
No matter how well we apply any management system, we will not get operational performance perfect—particularly in the front end of the improvement process. Creating and maintaining effective and safe operations is a long-term process and is never completely finished—simply, the fire will continue to teach us a never ending set of new lessons, so we had best understand we are all signed up as lifetime students.
A major reality in the beginning of the change process involves the traditional players having to “unlearn” an old behavior to somehow get to the new routine. As their boss, you don’t want to devalue the knowledge and skill they have developed through their (in some cases) many years of experience. Lots of times when we make major changes, we throw those valuable, absolutely essential, experience-based abilities out with the new program bathwater; this can be dangerous change agent territory.
There are many journeyman skills and abilities that take decades to master. These capabilities become the operational backbone of getting tactical work done. Young, bright, typically impatient, many times recently promoted officers who are on a “holy mission” can, if they don’t play it cool, devalue that long-term capability in favor of the whiz kids sitting in the front row who get the new routine the first time but can’t tell you within 15 minutes when the fire building will collapse.
Initial Radio Report. An example of an FGC change adventure (mess in the beginning) would be that we wrote an SOP and trained everyone who landed in the first arriver seat to give a short, simple, standard initial radio report. No big deal, huh? I had my parents called words I had never heard before (mostly from B-Shift, always fun) for five years while we made that change. For the 95 years before we standardized initial radio reporting, the most we would hear from a “talkative first arriver” would be, “Engine One on the scene.” In fact, as a firefighter, I worked on E-1, and my captain (absolutely spectacular firefighter/officer) didn’t even say the word “Engine.” He just muttered, “1 on scene.”
We kept harping over and over on the value of establishing an information management beachhead (standard initial radio report) at the very beginning of operations. Slowly, everyone worked through sounding a little awkward; eventually, a regular radio report became the standard way we started operations. There was a tipping point where our comfort level caught up to the SOP; after that point, the operation sounded out of balance without the report.
Staging. Another change you would think any sober person could pull off by next Thursday was staging. At that time in our department, everyone responding to a fire would drive as fast as we could so we could get as close as we could to the front door of the fire building. This created incredible congestion and confusion (to say the least). To somehow eliminate this traffic jam and improve (i.e., balance) our initial deployment, we wrote a short/sweet Staging SOP and sent everyone to staging school. A simple Staging SOP explanation follows: first engine/ladder, go directly to address side of fire building (before “side A” was invented) and do standard company functions (another SOP). Everyone else stops one block short, reports his arrival and direction (“E-2 staged west”), and then waits to be assigned by the (then) fireground commander (now) incident commander.
An elephant could have had five babies (two years gestation each birth = 10 years total time) in the same 10 years it took us to discipline ourselves to consistently apply the Staging SOP. Let’s use Staging as an example of how the change process actually works (when it actually works): We develop a Staging SOP. We train everyone in the SOP. The training involves an active discussion of the procedure, a detailed explanation of the new procedure, and a simulated exercise where the students get to actually apply and practice the SOP. Now we wait for an incident (“showtime”) to see how we do.
Some of the troops do the SOP perfectly; others act like they have never heard of you (change agent) or the procedure. After every incident, we have a critique during which a boss reviews our performance at the incident. That boss commends the ones who did the new staging routine. The same boss coaches/retrains (patiently, nicely) those who flubbed it up. Bosses (collectively) then look at the SOP to see if anything should be added/changed to make it work better. Sometimes, based on our experience in actually applying the procedure, there is the need to modify the SOP. We then go back to the training box on the model to explain the modifications.
A NEVER-ENDING PROCESS
Then, we just keep doing the five-step routine over and over. The longer we do it, the more of our folks we get on the “happy bus” to the future. We don’t ever give up on a department member; we will process a person through the model until he gets it—so, eventually, we get everybody aboard, and we drive off to that little piece of performance paradise. The model becomes the very practical structure for the trust-based promise we make to ourselves about how we are going to manage organizational change.
If you miss that trip of the change bus, wait for it, and it will be back to pick you up so we can all get to the same place. That place is standard, safe service delivery application. The model is not perfect, but it will work if we just keep using it in an honest, nonpolitical way that is patient, inclusive, humane, and good-natured (nice). It defines authentic, selfless leaders who want to help the organization effectively perform, and it will also cause mean-spirited, selfish jerks who want to punish their enemies to stand out.
This is what growing new “blooms” in the garden of change involves. We must have a pretty simple program management “map” to help us understand what to do next and a set of basic directions that help us to go back to an effective place where we can do over some part of the plan that did not get done as it says in the SOP. Without this direction, we end up getting stuck in program management “dead ends” when we encounter performance breakdowns.
The process is not a nice, neat, always overorganized routine where a group of well-behaved managers sit around a conference table stroking their chins while they academically contemplate a bright new future. What it mostly involves is a bunch of wet, gritty firefighters with mud and insulation all over their turnouts standing in the middle of a dirty street talking to each other in nice, short sentences. Once in awhile, they use adult words to describe what worked and what didn’t work right in the place where “the system” actually has to work, and then have that group decide how to convert the lessons into habits.
Retired Chief ALAN BRUNACINIis a fire service author and speaker. He and his sons own the fire service Web site bshifter.com.
